Today we are going to play a game called, “It’s my blog and I do what I want.” This post is long and devoid of pretty pictures and contains only tangential references to Paris. It’s filled to the brim with WHOTHEHELLAMI questions and a tiny bit of “This is what I think about the world.” […]

How did travel work before Google Translate? I could wax philosophical about all the profound changes technology and social media are having and the good, bad, and ugly about those implications. But let’s just not, all right? In college I found that the best way to survive mid-terms and finals was with the help of […]

As a self-appointed Road Trip Queen, I think there is considerable value in exploring the expanse of what actually comprises the US. I remember seeing an advertisement for a trucking company in the final stretches of one of my trips. “How far have you gone today? Want to go farther?” I was just crossing the […]

No matter how unseasonably warm everyone claimed it was, it was still London in October. I had been standing outside the Holborn underground station for 45 minutes, waiting for a friend. I had a general stressed-out feeling from all things grad school and I was buckling a little under the weight of my first real […]

Graduate school in Paris has turned out to be a bit heavy on the graduate school and light on the Paris. Papers and exams, it seems, are universal concepts and they followed me here. Or, rather, I chased them here. Because I chose to come here and be a student again. Because I really thought […]

Graduate school is structured to demoralize you. By design, it takes a gaggle of people who have long had a certain level of confidence in their ability to tackle academic pursuits, and kicks them in the knees, then spits on their faces. In theory, if you withstand the abuse, it does something really nice to […]

Romantic comedies and Disney have told us so many lies and given us so many misguided expectations that I could easily dedicate an entire blog to breaking these struggles down one by one. Suffice it to say that reality is thoroughly disappointing. I am slapped in the face with the inaccuracy of one particular lie […]

Paris is every single bit as lovely and charming and awesome and all of these other superb adjectives as I expected it to be. However, for all the time I spend saying this, it seems like it might be a bit more productive to actually show it off. I seldom break out my amazing-but-clunky DSLR, […]